“WWII Prisoner of War: How I Survived” is the story of a young American airman, Second Lt. Len Kovar, a B-24 bombardier from Carmichael, who was shot down over Eastern Europe on a beautiful day in 1943.

This candid, first-person account of terror behind enemy lines, capture and imprisonment in Nazi Stalag prisoner of war camps begins on a sunny day at 20,000 feet. It takes readers into the muddy encampments and freezing death marches prisoners of war faced as Russian forces advanced across Eastern Europe.

Kovar will join the Placer County Friends of the Library for a book sale and signing Saturday, April 27, at the Granite Bay Library.

Kovar will share the strategies that kept him and others alive as they struggled to survive each day. Like the infamous Pacific Theater’s Bataan Death March, hundreds of U.S. and Allied prisoners died as Nazi captors force-marched them through one of the worst European winters ever recorded to Stalag Prison Camps deep inside German lines.

Kovar provides a candid story of survival, his personal struggle to endure and a unique insight into the minds of prisoners and German soldiers following orders of their Nazi leaders. Kovar’s tale features photographs taken with a smuggled camera inside the Stalag razor wire and barracks of Nazi P.O.W. camps before VE Day.

Like many of the soldiers, sailors, Marines and airmen of World War II, Kovar came home from his service a changed man. Falling into Fascist-occupied territory, Kovar relied on his personal belief in God, making a bargain to survive and live to share his faith with others when he got home … alive.